The Trial
by Velevet Night
Summary: They call it the Trail. Nothing but that. Just one, simple word. Like the name, the rules are simple; survive and be deemed fit to continue living, or die. Eventual Fax! Hints of an Iggy pairing.


Well, hello there! For those of you who don't know me, I'm Jasmine, and I write on fanfiction (WHO KNEW?). As a little intro, here's three things about me; I sail, invest way to much time in convincing my vegetarian friends to cook me meat because they literally cook the best bacon ever, and I find milk to be one of the most putrid tasting things in the world.

Now that we're aquantied-ish, enjoy the story! and, as always, review!

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Disclaimer: I don't own Maxiumum Ride; the book and all entities belong to James Patterson.  
(well that was boring.)

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Max POV-

Some days just shit on themselves the moment that they begin. The second you get up everything is just terrible. And I don't mean terrible in the "whoospie, you dropped your icecream on the ground and now it's gone forever and you don't have money to buy another" kind of sucks. No, I mean the legitimate kind of terrible, the kind that makes you want to find the human incarnation of your day and ask it why it felt like shatting all over itself. Sadly, that's not possible, so most days we just have to settle for strangling harmless pillows until our anger is satiated by the harming of a fluffy white square.

Just to. . . make my point a little clearer, let me give you a helpful list of some things included in the "Good Ways to Start off the Day of Maximum Ride" list.

Cookies. Always cookies.

Not being woken up until the decent time of noon. Or one. Or two. Or, you know, not being woken up at all.

And that about concludes the entire list. So as you can see, not many things constitute as a good day starter in my world; if you have half a brain, that should bring you to the converse conclusion that not many things count as being terrible day starters, either. Generally I'm a pretty easy going person, and though admittedly I do have a bit of a fiery temper at times and I _can_ be a little bossy, I roll with most things.

Now, you may be wondering something along the lines of, "Hey, Maximum, why are you griping about your day sucking so bad? Also, who named you Maximum and why did they chose such a ridiculous name?" Now, just to put this out there, I'm not the type of person who is so overly fond of questions. To be quite frank with you, I'm okay with answering them once, but if you ask me to repeat myself I'm probably going to turn into a flamethrower and launch myself at your face. However, due to the. . . extenuating circumstances that I find myself today, (which happen to be sitting unhappily in the back of a large white van that reeks quite strongly of wet dog) I suppose I can take ten minutes out of my life and fill you in.

As you know already, provided you have been paying some attention, my name is Maximum Ride. The first thing you need to know about me is that I go by Max, and nothing else. Maximum is fine if I don't know you and I haven't had a chance to correct you yet, and I will let Maxine slide if you're a first time offender – but not Maxie, and definitely not the constant and overdone joke about whether or not I really am the "maximum ride".

For all of you in the "slow" section, there is in fact a reason that I was named Maximum, and the reason is not just that I have crazy parents who were high when it came time to name me and subsequently couldn't delve deep enough into their befuddled brains to find a name better than some random adjective. It happens that actually there are two reasons, the first being that my father, Jeb, believed that giving me a "strong" name would better my chances of survival, so Maximum I became. If you ask me, it was a pretty cliché strong name. Actually, the entire idea of a strong name is ridiculous, but you have no idea how many people in this society have a name even worse than mine. I wake up every day and thank whatever ultimate force or entity exists that I didn't get a name like Chokehold – because, yes, I do know a girl named Chokehold. In his defense, Jeb never really has been a creative man. On the contrary, he's actually quite a bland person. If asked me to describe Jeb, the first thing that comes to my mind is something along the lines of porridge mixed with cement (for the added grey hue and the just-a-bit-to-hard texture).

The other reason I was named Maximum– one that he denies with a passion – is that he wanted a boy and was determined to have one, regardless of the fact that they knew I would be a girl since the moment they could know what my gender would be. This, of course, spawns another question for the rare few of you who happen to be intellects; "Max, why didn't your parents just have another child and hope that one would be a boy?" Yes, this is the obvious solution. However, due to the fact that each family is permitted only one child until the first born either dies or is proved to be worthy, that wasn't going to work out so well considering that I was the fist born child in my family.

Now, before I go off on some tangent that you can't understand, I think I owe you all some sort of backstory, however tedious I find telling it. To start, I live in the state of California, which I hear was at one point part of a nation called the United States of America. The country, supposedly a place of liberty and freedom, yadda yadda yadda, was in North America. However, the term USA is now no longer anything more than a term that describes a place, pretty much exactly like the term bedroom describes a certain room in your house and bathroom another. All other countries are obsolete, not just the USA. Nothing anybody once stood for exists any longer, thanks to a man that is infamous throughout the entire world. His name is Doctor Hans Gunther-Hagen, and he controls the entire planet.

Ominous, right? "He controls the entire planet." Way to be melodramatic, Max. But it's true, though, and he controls the entire goddamn thing. Him and his buddies from this place called Itex worked for years to create what they deemed the perfect plan for the world, something called the "one half plan", which is essentially exactly what the name says but with one extra element – the world kill. The basic plan was to kill one half of the entire worlds population and then proceed to use the remaining people (all of whom would, at this point, be only extremely talented or extremely useful and deemed fit to live by Hansy himself) to create a utopian society where all who had helped create it would deserve to live there. At least, that was the original idea.

Hans started his revolution about forty years ago, with popular support of a great number of people whom he had promised equality and a good life. With all of these people – spread through the world, not just through a certain country – and all of these fancy weapons and things that he helped to create at Itex, Dr. Hans Gunther-Hagen was able to become a very powerful man very quickly, and eventually take over the world. And I guess everything was going just peachy in Hansys utopian doings, (and this part is a little hazy because I fell asleep during history class right around this point) but when Dr. Hans just started killing off people left and right, simply on the basis of their IQ and what they could and could not do, things went downhill very fast. Not only did he lose the majority of his support from people and started resorting to violence to keep everything in check, but he killed off all the people that did the worlds dirty work, and then some.

Now, I personally have never had the pleasure (not) of meeting Dr. Hans, but right off he sounds like a flaming ball of shit, doesn't he? If I was in charge of this one half plan fuckery, Dr. Hans would be one of the first to go. I'm not exactly sure what kind of a total stupid idiot Dr. God is, but I can assure you that he is quite a large one. I don't know where and in what universe anyone would think it would be a good idea to kill off plumbers, construction workers, and garbage men, but Dr. Hans sure thought he had the right idea all picture perfect with his one half plan. So he started killing off all of the vital people, and you know what happened? Chaos. That's what happened.

I'm not going to go into all the grotesque details of how everything flooded and broke down and there were massive famines, mostly because it would take hours t tell about the terrible famines and droughts and such. The important part, though, is that the whole time that people were dying outside, Hansy was sitting pretty in his big lords castle snacking on oreos or twinkies or something, rethinking his entire one half plan. And in rethinking his plan, he realized one major flaw; he had forgotten to factor in the children. The children, the people who made up a huge amount of the population and determined it's future. Tough nubs for him when he found that he had to no way to accurately judge their worth of because they were too young.

Hans, however, was not one to take the obvious route out and just wait until the children were eighteen and then judge them, no. He didn't even take the sensible and much wished for route and give up the title of "Supreme Overlord of the Entire Fucking World" when he saw that he a total fucktard. No, Hans decided that each child would have two options; one, their mental capacity would be calculated and when it was at a medium range they would be put into a Trail, or two, they could take an intelligence test. If you passed the intelligence test within a score of ninety-five percent or higher, you didn't have to go through the trial. In the end, everyone had to take both; the mental test was to weed out the idiots, and the trial to weed out the weaklings.

Now, not only is this the most unoriginal name I have ever heard, but the trail itself is the most ridiculous thing, I have ever witnessed. Basically how it works is this; you're chosen at random from a pool of people whose mental capacity has reached medium. Six people are drawn a week, three girls and three boys from whatever age group they happen to be; age is insignificant in the calculations, which means that every so often you get a three year old who's a little tiny genius, and it's a bloody shame considering that the vast majority die in the Trail considering they're really not old enough to take the test accurately.

In hindsight, though, this gives the entire regime the idea of oppression as an under rather than as a straight out, point blank thing. Those little tiny geniuses could grow up and find a way to overthrow the world that Dr. God worked so hard to achieve, so by killing them off at a young age they ensure that the kid never grows up enough to overthrow him. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the first smart thing that Hansy has ever done in his entire life. I still think he ate paste until he was at least twelve, though.

Anyways, six people get chosen and are then placed into a group. After they remove you from your family, you have three days in a dingy motel room to meet your group members and hope to god that you can survive with them. And next? Well, nobody quite knows what happens next – they don't tell you until you get to your little motel, and anybody who tells or even thinks about telling is killed – but it's rumored to be almost impossible to survive. And the very small number of people in the new generation is probably the best proof that the rumors are true.

Now, back to the original question of why my day sucked so bad. I'm sure that you can guess what happened, but for the purpose of squelching my boredom I'm going to give you the entire story.

My mother is a woman who in no way approves of sleeping in. She's more of a at-dawn-we-rise type of woman, and true to that statement she gets up at dawn almost every single day. For the record, my mother is a great lady, just a little too old fashioned for her own good. She prefers to not have any electronics in use in our house and basically only buys all natural products.

My mother is the exact opposite of my father, a man who is almost always on his phone or staying up into the obscenest hours of the night. Her name is Valencia Martinez – Ride, but everyone calls her Val. She's a Hispanic woman in her late thirties, short and a little on the plump side, with long dark hair and warm brown eyes. I honestly can't think of a person who doesn't like her, myself included. Unfortunately, I take more after my father, who is a tall and lean man in his early forties with sickly pale skin and a mop of brownish-blonde hair ontop of his balding head. My looks almost mirror that of Jeb, save for the fact that I am not balding and that (thank god) my skin got a bit of color from my mother, as did my eyes, which are the same warm brown as hers.

My day started with me not getting to sleep in; I was woken up just as the sun became visible by a much too cheerful Val to do some of the most important work in the entire world. Wait for it, it was. . . gardening! That's right, I was woken up at the god damn crack of dawn to help my mother garden.

As you can see, that in itself was just _the best_ part of my day.

After a lot of swearing on my part and a shit ton of coaxing from Val, I was up and stumbling blearily around our house in a pair of sweats and a thin camisole, searching in vain for some warm boots to cram my feet into. In my half passed out state, I attempted to shove my foot into our cat. Our cat did not appreciate this one bit, and made it's feelings known with the loud hiss it gave me. Eventually, though, I found my shoes and pulled them on before stumbling outside to Val. Before even giving me a hello, she passed me a spade and pointed to a small plot of land that she wanted me to do something with. Once I got the message and staggered over to the little patch and dug in with my spade, Val started to chat happily to me about the plans for the summer. And that is basically how my morning went, until the mailman ran up, panting, a plain white envelope in his hand. I took one look at that thing and my blood ran cold.

Okay, lets pause here for a second. You're probably at the, "Oh no, a plain white envelope! The _terror_!" stage right about now. Well, see, there are a few types of envelopes in our society. Light blue ones which represents a regular, handwritten letter, light red ones which have to do with money or bills or advertisements, and then the plain white ones which are reserved specially for the trail. They're nicknamed coats, some reason having to do with the envelope containing nothing but air when you open it. This transferred over, and the people who work for the government and help with the trails are called whitecoats, half because of the letters and half because they wear white coats as well. And I don't know a single person who doesn't fear the whitecoats.

Now, this is where things really start to go downhill, since, as you know, they are the mark of the trail. Anyone who gets one has a short amount of time to prepare for the city regulated transportation van to come and get them, an hour to say their goodbyes, possibly indefinitely. The mailman handed me the letter and promptly booked it away, because he knew just how much of a bitch I could be even when it wasn't six AM, and I can only imagine how much he did not want to know how much of a bitch I could be when it was six AM _and _I had just received bad new.

My mother was just standing there, her face full of shock. I played it cool, giving her a nonchalant expression even though inside I was just about ready to puke. Hey, I can get nervous, but nobody else can know. I put up my mask, my walls, and shifted towards the house, suddenly very awake.

"Gess I should go say my goodbyes to Jeb, shouldn't I?" there had been a long enough pause between when I got the letter and when I spoke that my mother jolted a little. I flicked my eyes to her and then the door, unsure of what do now. The air felt different than it did normally, the comfort and laughter that my moms presence usually carried with her gone .

"Yeah." This time it was my turn to jolt, having gone off on a little tangent in my head. I hadn't really expected her to say anything. "Yeah, you should hurry, honey." she looked up at me with glazed eyes, and after a quick moment she lurched forward to wrap me into a tight hug. After a pause I wrapped my arms back around her frame, squishing her to me for a long minute, two minutes, three.

A little gasp was audible from by my ear – Val. I creased my brow as I turned, half fearing and half expecting what was behind me. The city regulation van had already turned up, and I had no time to change into anything decent or say the rest of my goodbyes.

The van parked.

Val started spewing out words, telling me that she loved me and to take care and not to die. I did my best to placate her, though in my head I was certainly thinking something snarky about how, yes, I did not want to die either.

With a last wave and smile I allowed myself to step back towards the van, whose sliding door sat open and waiting for me. A worker in a white jumpsuit tipped his hat to my mom, who gave a watery smile in response. And just like that I stepped into the van, the door rolled shut, and I was on my way. Though whether it was to my execution or to the rest of my life I haven't yet decided.

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Thoughts? Opinions? Questions? REVIEW!

(I love reviews. Just putting that out there.)

The other chapters won't be as morbid as this one, I promise. She gets to meet the rest of the group in the next chapter, so watch for that!

-Jazz


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